


Life in the After

by Tangerine



Category: In the Flesh (TV)
Genre: Antagonism, Canon-Typical Behavior, First Time, Love/Hate, M/M, On the Run, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-05
Updated: 2019-08-05
Packaged: 2020-07-09 00:54:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,924
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19878910
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tangerine/pseuds/Tangerine
Summary: Kieren and Gary, on the run.  When PDS sufferers target Kieren in an attempt to bring about the Second Rising, Gary does his best to make sure that doesn't happen.





	Life in the After

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Sandrine Shaw (Sandrine)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sandrine/gifts).



They've been in this run-down flat for three days, longer than any of the other places Gary has dragged him to. Maybe it's the unrelenting rain or maybe this place is safer than it looks, but Gary's made no noises about moving, and Kieren can't find it in himself to ask. It doesn't matter anyway. There's nowhere to go. Not Roarton, not Paris, just stuck in this dreary place with Gary, his own personal hell.

* * *

Once the sun sets, Gary goes out for takeaway. 

They've spent the morning snapping at each other – Kieren can't help himself, he's tried, he just can't keep his mouth shut whenever Gary's spouting nonsense in his direction, which is all the fucking time, it feels like – and Gary mercifully leaves without a parting shot. Plenty of time for that later anyway.

Kieren gets up and walks to the window, staring outside. Still raining, still grey. Kieren catches a glimpse of himself in the cracked mirror above the fireplace. Days ago – maybe weeks, Kieren can't remember exactly when Gary showed up at the house, shouting at him to pack a bag and go – he had stopped wearing the mousse and the contacts. Gary had looked at him and muttered _fucking dry rot_ before shuffling off into the loo, but that had been the end of it. No snarky comments since either. 

They've had two good rows, but mostly they just bicker at each other like an old married couple. So nothing different from how they usually are together, and that's comforting. Kieren doesn't know where they are exactly, just that they're south of Roarton somewhere, but not quite far enough to be in Wales. 

If Gary takes him to Wales, Kieren will know they've both finally lost their fucking minds.

* * *

After an hour of peace and quiet, Gary comes back with fish and chips, a bottle of whiskey and a couple soggy newspapers rolled under his arm. He drops his stuff in the kitchen then shrugs out of his coat. It's warm enough that underneath Gary's wearing only a tee and a pair of well-worn blue jeans. No camo to be seen, not since they left Roarton in such a hurry. Kieren watches him despite himself. 

"What are you staring at, dry rot?" Gary asks as he settles down at the table. "Fancy a nibble?"

"I'm good, thanks," Kieren replies, ignoring Gary's smirk as he takes a swig of the whiskey, straight from the bottle. "Any news then?" he tries instead, shifting his eyes to Gary's soaking copy of _The Guardian_. There's a headline on the front page about the Second Rising, foreboding and sensational. 

"Nothing good. It's like the whole world's gone round the bend," Gary says, mouth full of half-chewed fish, just shovelling it in like he's starving. Gary has a lot of quirks like that – eats like it's his last meal, sleeps fully dressed, boots and all, showers with a loaded rifle always within reach, pillowed on clean linen towels. "Sent word to Jem," he adds blandly, taking a drink. "Let her know you're all right." 

"Trying to get back in her good books, Gary?"

He snorts. "Fat fucking chance of that. About as likely as you and that Irish rotter giving it another go."

"Still going on about him, are you?" Kieren asks faintly. Simon had been there that night, an honorary member of the Walker family, when Gary had practically beaten down the door, shouting about shit he'd read on the Internet. He and Simon had almost come to blows, but Jem had stepped in grimly. If she hadn't confirmed the shit Gary had been spouting, Kieren would've never willingly gone with him.

Still didn't really understand why he had. To keep his parents and Jem safe, he told himself. He knew there were nutters out there – Amy was proof of that – and he didn't want to cause any more trouble than he already had. For all his paranoia, for all his delusion, Gary was first and foremost a survivor. 

So Kieren had gone because it had felt like the only choice. 

Or because sometimes, he still felt Gary's fingers around his wrist, pulling at him, painfully bruising. It shouldn't have been possible – Kieren had checked after, in the dingy light of a petrol-station loo, for any sign of purple on his skin, but it'd been the same pallid grey, cold and untouched – but for a moment, he was sure it had hurt, that he'd felt _something_ , and maybe that was why he had gone instead.

* * *

Despite their parts in his current situation, at his loneliest, he misses Jem and his mum and dad. There's not a lot of comfort there, at home, but they're familiar in a way that Gary isn't. At least they mean well when Gary certainly doesn't. He'd take an awkward dinner miming through the act of eating over this. 

Sometimes, he's too numb with grief to think too much about anything. 

But more often than that... he misses Amy. Dreadfully. That's the only thing he's sure about. She'd find this whole situation hilarious, and he tries to think as she would. Everything could be worse. He isn't sure how, with Gary glaring daggers at him from across the room, but Amy was the optimist, not him.

* * *

They spend two more days in that dingy little flat before Gary comes flying into the room, soaked to his bones, and drags Kieren out into the night again. Kieren's spent days scouring the two newspapers Gary brought back with him – _The Guardian_ and _The Times_ , wrinkled with rainwater, both covering the current events like they're on the precipice of a second war – but he feels like he's no better informed.

The lunatic fringe has identified him as the probable First Risen. Which is absolutely bonkers, beyond the pale, but there are times he thinks humanity has gone mad. That they'll never learn. That what happened to Amy will happen to him because people are so desperate for answers, for explanations. 

Sometimes shit things happen, for no reason, and that's all there is to it.

Admittedly, it's taken Kieren a long time to get to this point, so he can barely fault the idiot mob.

* * *

Kieren has no idea how word got out, but two blokes are waiting outside. They goggle at them, startled when he and Gary burst onto the street. There's a fight; Gary takes it too far, as usual, though Kieren can't help but think they both had it coming. "Fucking twats," Gary says, kicking one of them. 

"Friends of yours then?" Kieren asks. 

"Fuck off," Gary replies, shrugging his pack back onto his shoulder. "They're none of mine."

But Gary does have friends – surprisingly, Kieren thinks meanly, hanging back in the shadows, hoodie pulled over his head – and they're whisked away into the night by a grizzled old man who neither speaks nor asks questions. Gary sits up front and sleeps; Kieren stares out the window at nothing.

* * *

They hole up again in a cottage in the middle of nowhere. Gary spends the morning setting traps, hoping to catch something edible, and manages to dig up a couple suspect potatoes from a long-ignored garden. He still has the bottle of whiskey, which he takes a drink from every night, before bed. 

Gary has nightmares. Loud, chilling nightmares. Kieren pretends he doesn't hear them, like he did with Jem. Some strange emotion hovers under his skin, echoes of things he's experienced before, when his body still felt things, when his heart still beat. In his waking hours, Gary's still a grade A arsehole.

That helps. 

But Gary's also been the one administering the neurotriptyline every evening without complaint. He's not kind or gentle about it – and Kieren would be suspicious if he was – but he does it efficiently, like it's an unpleasant thing that needs to be done. Kieren imagines he feels the pads of Gary's fingertips on his skin, warm and calloused. The daydream is so vividly real, it's like he almost believes he can.

* * *

"Will you stop staring at me with those fucking eyes," Gary snaps one morning over tea. Neither of them has slept very well, nerves and the poor weather rumbling outside keeping them both restless and unsettled. It's all been building for hours, and Kieren's just grateful he wasn't the first one to break.

"What do you want me to do, Gary? Pluck them out of my head?" Kieren replies sharply, arms crossed defensively in front of his chest. He had been staring, he'll admit it, but Gary had been staring back. "And where else am I supposed to look? There's nothing to do except stare at your ugly face all day."

"Like you're so pretty yourself."

"You know what I mean," Kieren replies. 

"I'm sorry if I'm not entertaining enough for you while I try to keep you alive."

"I didn't ask you to do that. I didn't ask for any of this."

"Maybe I'll just fucking leave you here then. See how long you last on your own, without me watching your back." Gary eyes him up and down, taking his measure, then scoffs dismissively. "You'll be rabid in a day if you're not walking straight into the arms of some bloke trying to off you as he fucks you."

"Jealous, are you?" Gary glares at him, breathing hard, and Kieren can't help himself, now that he's going. Blandly, he adds, "surprised you didn't bring any blue oblivion along with you. Get me all chained up, push me around a little while I can't fight back. Or is it that you feel guilty about that?"

That gets Gary's hackles up. He leans across the table, eyes hot with anger. "I did what had to be done. For the good of Roarton, like always. Nobody ever fucking listens to me. And you were fine, weren't you? Snapped out of it on your own, and your fucking Irish rotter got to play hero instead of murderer."

"Like you're any better than he is," Kieren snaps.

"At least you've always known exactly who I am," Gary replies, standing up and slamming his empty mug in the sink. He tugs on his jacket and grabs the key to the cottage. "And fuck right off," he adds, thick with feeling, then stomps out of the room and slams the door behind him. He locks Kieren inside.

* * *

Kieren spends the next several hours alone, growing increasingly convinced Gary has actually left him here. In the middle of nowhere, with enough neurotriptyline to last the week, no money, no idea where he is. He doesn't even know how he'd call for help – he doesn't fancy asking some random on the street to borrow their mobile. With tensions as high as they are, they'd just as likely harm him as help him. 

He can just imagine how that call would go anyway. Maybe his dad would come, maybe he wouldn't. Same with his mum. They'd tried to send him to Norfolk, and he hadn't quite forgiven them for that, not entirely. And Simon, well. They'd had a brief go at it, but their feelings weren't aligned, not properly. It had been easy enough to walk away, though Simon remained in his life as a friend, but it's complicated.

Too complicated for Kieren to deal with right now. He has his hands full with Gary as it is. 

So maybe Jem, but he wants her to have a chance at a normal life. With Gary no longer tempting her into a life best left forgotten, Kieren thinks she could do it if he and Gary just stopped messing it up. 

But he can't let himself go rabid, even knowing he might be able to come back. 

"Fucking Gary," Kieren mutters and stands by the window, waiting. He almost feels cold.

* * *

Gary comes back, soaked to the bone and smelling like manure. Doesn't say anything, just toes off his trainers and tosses a paper bag at Kieren, hitting him square in the belly. Kieren flinches but catches it before it drops. As Gary shrugs off his sopping clothes, Kieren opens the package and almost drops it.

It's a pad of paper and a tin of pencils.

Gary glares at him, daring him to say something, but Kieren refuses. 

As Kieren opens the sketchbook to the clean first page – the edges of the paper are only a little damp from the rainwater – Gary strips down to nothing. Kieren tries not to watch him, the bare expanse of his back and how the muscles shift under his skin, how finely tuned his entire body is, healthy and alive.

The question remains: how can something so beautiful hold such shit inside it?

* * *

Kieren sketches everyone he's ever known from memory, including another one of Amy, but he eventually runs out of people, and he starts sketching Gary instead. Gary, cleaning his gun with an intensity that frightens. Gary, staring blankly out the window into the dark, nursing his nightly whiskey. Gary, asleep, hand curled into the blankets, face tight with haunted memories. Gary, in the bath, nude.

That last one is tasteful, but Kieren spends a mortifying amount of time getting the musculature just so. It doesn't help that he's got a mild tremor in his hands – and he doesn't want to think about what that means, so he just pushes it out of his mind and perseveres through, nothing to worry about here, just an expected side effects of his medication – and keeps having to use his thumb to rub the graphite out. 

Still... it's his best drawing yet. He'd be a fool to deny that single basic fact. He's proud of himself. 

Gary catches him at that one, startling Kieren out of his focus by bumping him on the shoulder, hard. "You're such a fucking poof," he says, squinting at the image. If he starts critiquing Kieren's work, he's going to lose it. They've had a peaceful few days. "Desperate to see the meat and two veg, are you?" 

"No one's that demented," Kieren replies faintly. "Why seek out such crushing disappointment?"

It takes Gary a moment to get it, and his expression sours. "Don't get any ideas anyway," he warns. 

"I don't waste my time on the microscopic," Kieren replies as Gary plops down on the threadbare sofa. He doesn't look as angry as Kieren wishes he did. The verbal sparring is a lot more satisfying when Gary's fighting back, frothing at the mouth, but they've gone almost seventy-two hours without issue. 

"I didn't think rotters could even, you know," Gary flops his hand up and down, "get a hard on." 

It's Kieren who finally breaks. "For fuck's sake, Gary."

Gary stares at him but doesn't say anything else, just sits there looking satisfied that he's finally won a round. His gaze drops between Kieren's legs, that bland expression shifting slowly to a knowing smirk. It infuriates him, and Kieren wishes his numb, partially deceased body would work right, just once. 

But it doesn't. It never does. Kieren goes back to his drawing, but it feels ruined now.

* * *

The longer they stay, the more the cottage feels like home. Gary comes back one day with a telly and spends two days trying to wire the thing up to catch a signal. When he finally gets it, the picture comes in fuzzy, but it's clear enough to make sense of what they're watching. The sudden presence of noise is jarring. Kieren had gotten used to the quiet – Gary's soft muttering, his wheezy breath while he sleeps.

The news from outside is bad. Tensions high on both sides, attacks on the tube in London, protests. 

Almost no news from rural towns, but that's not surprising. Kieren's always understood why the HVF came to be, even if he hates what it did to Jem and Roarton. He doesn't even fault Gary for his role in it, not if he's being honest with himself. If he places himself on the other side of the equation, with the living instead of the dead, he thinks he might've been out there with a chainsaw alongside his mum. 

But who knows what might have been? All he has is the way things are. 

"Turn it off," Kieren finally says, after two days of watching Gary obsessively follow the screen.

"Fuck you," Gary replies, but he sounds knackered. 

Kieren gets up and silences the telly, plunging the cottage back into silence. Gary glares at him, but he falls asleep within minutes, head tilted back on the sofa, mouth open, snoring faintly. It'd be so easy to leave him there, just open the front door and walk away, but Kieren can't make himself do it, not then.

* * *

Kieren begins the day feeling poorly. Convinced he's hot then cold then hot again. His hands keep trembling, which makes sketching impossible, and he's in a terrible mood by noon. It isn't helped by Gary's existence or the way he keeps looking but not looking at Kieren. This whole thing is madness.

"What's your problem?" Gary finally asks after hours of this. "Are you sick?"

"I have nothing left in me to get sick, Gary," Kieren snaps, pacing back and forth past the window. It's raining again, big surprise, but even with the downpour, he wishes he could go outside for a walk, alone. "As you keep reminding me, every part of me is rotting, and I'm not getting any worse." 

Gary gets up and walks over to him. "I can't do anything for you if you're sick," he says.

"I'm not fucking sick. And even if I was, wouldn't that solve all your problems?" He looks over at Gary and takes immense pleasure in irritation. "What are you even doing here? What am _I_ doing here?"

"I'm saving your life," Gary says, his voice on the edge of anger. 

"Why you, Gary?" Kieren pokes at him again, enjoying the set of Gary's jaw and the way his eyes go hot. He's tired of suffering alone. "Fifty million people in England, and for some reason it's you?" 

"Because I'm the one with nothing to lose!" Gary shouts in his face, shaking with rage, and Kieren feels his own hands tremble. "Do you get it? I go and no one misses me. What do I leave behind? A shitty flat? A dead family? There's not one fucking person in Roarton who would even notice I was gone."

Kieren feels the edge soften on his own anger, rubbed smooth with some horrific feeling that's too close to pity for comfort. Gary doesn't deserve his sympathy. These past few weeks haven't been enough. Kieren doesn't know where that line is, but they haven't crossed it, not yet. They might never get there. 

Gary adds, "they're probably happy that I'm gone. I might even get my own fucking parade out of it." 

On that, Kieren agrees, but that's still not the full explanation. "Why me?" Kieren presses. Gary is like a wound he can't stop picking at. None of this makes sense, and Kieren is just... _done_. "Why try to do whatever it is you think you're doing? Why play this twisted game of house like we're even friends?"

"You ungrateful zombie _bastard_ ," Gary spits. Kieren clenches his hands at his side as Gary crowds into his space. "Do you think I'm making this all up? Do you think I wanted to log on one day to see your name and face all over my screen? Should I just have let them have you and be done with it?"

"Why didn't you?" Kieren asks, refusing to respond to Gary's proximity. He's been manhandled by Gary enough to know this could go a dozen ways, eleven of them terrible. "You hate me. You hate who and what I am. You always have. Don't deny it, Gary. I see it in your eyes every time you look at me."

Gary leans in even closer and meets his eyes. "Because you're not theirs to have," he snarls. 

"Whose am I then?"

"Mine," Gary says, neat and succinct like it's the only statement of fact he's ever uttered in his life. He stares at Kieren a little longer, challenging him, then thumps one fist against the wall and makes to move away, but Kieren stops him. Grabs him by the jumper, holding him there, their gazes still locked. 

"You don't get to say that like a creep and then run away," Kieren says. 

"I'm not a fucking creep," Gary replies and then Gary kisses him.

* * *

It isn't sweet or gentle or any of the kisses Kieren's had before. Gary's not tentative like Rick or confident like Simon, but some unknown third that edges towards desperation. Their teeth clack noisily, and the wall is unforgiving against Kieren's back. Kieren curls his hand into Gary's unkempt hair, twisting hard enough to hurt, but Gary just surges against him, all sleek muscle and biting mouth. 

Kieren doesn't even know if he can fuck, but he's pulling at Gary's clothes anyway as Gary returns the favour. If nothing else, Gary can rub one off on his belly, eyes fixed on Kieren's face as he comes, or maybe Kieren can turn him around, lay him over the sofa and fuck him as deep as his fingers will go.

"Jesus," Gary says suddenly, looking down as he pulls back. "You've got a semi, you undead freak."

"Stop talking," Kieren replies and kisses him until he shuts up, hands working at Gary's waistband, shoving his jeans down. His cock is pointed up hard, red at the tip, slick with fluid. Kieren's got plenty of experience with cocks – mostly his own – and wraps his hand around Gary's prick, stroking him. 

"Fuck," Gary groans, pushing into his palm, grunting into his ear. Kieren relishes the power he holds. 

They fuck – or some semblance of fucking, and in this strange new world, he imagines it counts – up against the wall, partially undressed, rutting like animals. It's not until Gary's hand is on his own cock that Kieren realizes Gary hadn't just been taking the piss out of him. It's not a full one, but it's there. 

They pull at each other, kissing open-mouthed, primal and relishing it. Kieren keeps his hand moving, faster and faster, as Gary clumsily gropes him, hand tucked down the front of Kieren's pants. When Gary comes on his belly, hot white streaks over his skin, Kieren is convinced he actually feels it.

And whatever his own body does, it's enough. It's the first physical brush with pleasure he's had since he died and that Gary was the one to give it to him... well, shit happens. And while he still doesn't like him very much, not most of the time, Gary has his moments. It could just be how wrecked Gary looks and the knowledge that he did that, but Kieren experiences his first flicker of Amy-approved optimism.

Maybe things will be all right, and this is as bad as they'll ever be. Maybe Gary isn't a total prat. 

Maybe what happened to Amy really is happening to him and there's life to be had after everything. 

It's a bit terrifying, the idea that his body might be coming alive again. He's not there yet, and there's a host of danger between him and that, but if Gary can keep him safe just a little while longer... and if neither of them kills each other in the meantime or get too distracted by fucking to protect themselves... 

It's enough.


End file.
